As we saw in the preceding chapter, a number of classical and contemporary theories of social attitudes and intergroup relations have given us some important insights into the nature and dynamics of intergroup conflict, stereotyping, and group oppression. However, there has yet to be a serious effort to integrate these insights into one coherent and comprehensive theoretical model. In an effort to accomplish this and gain a firmer purchase on the almost boringly repetitive nature of human oppression, we have developed social dominance theory (SDT). While this approach is new in many ways, its primary virtue is that it ties together the most critical and useful components and models reviewed in Chapter 1. The most important sources for our new synthesis can be found in the ideas of (a) authoritarian personality theory, (b) Rokeach's two-value theory of political behavior, (c) Blumer's group positions theory, (d) Marxism and neoclassical elite theories, (e) results from political attitude and public opinion research, (f) social identity theory (SIT), and (g) modern thinking within evolutionary psychology While SDT has been influenced by models within personality psychology, social psychology, and political sociology, it is neither strictly a psychological nor a sociological theory, but rather an attempt to connect the worlds of individual personality and attitudes with the domains of institutional behavior and social structure. Thus, SDT is an attempt to integrate several levels of analysis into one coherent theoretical framework.